Medication Administration – Understanding Medication Errors

In this lesson, we are going to go over some topics to help you understand how medication errors occur and what nurses can do to help prevent them.  We will also outline what the general procedures are in the event a medication error does occur.

Learning Objectives:

Upon the completion of this lesson, learners will be able to:

1. Understand the most common reasons for the occurrence of medication errors 
2. Become familiar with medication names that a familiar that nurses need to carefully screen for prior to medication administration
3. Identify high alert medications
4. Determine actions nurses can take to reduce the risk for medication errors
5. Describe the purpose of an incident report